Quotes
Quotes about Wit
'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere.
An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gayly, that came at my call,
Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.
The cold winds swept the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And 'mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press'd,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.
Abide with me from morn till eve,
For without Thee I cannot live;
Abide with me when night is nigh,
For without Thee I dare not die.
They grew in beauty side by side,
They filled one home with glee:
Their graves are severed far and wide
By mount and stream and sea.
Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
Oh, call my brother back to me!
I cannot play alone:
The summer comes with flower and bee,--
Where is my brother gone?
When I am dead, no pageant train
Shall waste their sorrows at my bier,
Nor worthless pomp of homage vain
Stain it with hypocritic tear.
You shall not pile, with servile toil,
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil
Lay down the wreck of power to rest,
Where man can boast that he has trod
On him that was "the scourge of God."
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
The stormy March has come at last,
With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.
But 'neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,--
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshippers.
When Freedom from her mountain-height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
And striped its pure, celestial white
With streakings of the morning light.
Flag of the free heart's hope and home!
By angel hands to valour given!
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome,
And all thy hues were born in heaven.
Forever float that standard sheet!
Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet,
And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?
He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust.
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon.
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.
Dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
I saw two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on,
And mingled into one.
I thought that morning cloud was blest,
It moved so sweetly to the West.
Fill the seats of justice
With good men, not so absolute in goodness
As to forget what human frailty is.
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,--imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,--"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of--the air!"
I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.
